The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Institutes of Health have started a collaborative study on the development of lighting that will provide enhanced, specific to various tissues, contrast with respect to its surroundings. In this paper we describe existing NIST technologies utilized for this project such as the computational model for color rendering and the new spectrally tunable lighting technology. We will also discuss the reference camera calibration and validation procedure and show example of imaged tissue under various lighting conditions.